Colin Farrell: I was wrongly arrested for attempted murder

19 June 2015 11:10 AM

Colin Farrell

Colin Farrell has revealed he was wrongly arrested for attempted murder in his late teens.

The Dublin actor (39) revealed in an interview on the Tonight Show that he was taken into custody when he was in Sydney, Australia, in his late teens because he resembled another man who was being sought for the crime.

Although he hadn't done anything wrong, he began to question himself when he took a look at the image of the suspect.

The star relived the situation during an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, with Jimmy and Colin's True Detective co-star Vince Vaughn pretending they were policemen questioning him about what happened.

"How long ago was it, I want to see if the statute of limitations in it...?" Colin joked.

He said: "It was a long time ago and I was drunk. I saw a photo-fit of the guy that actually did the crime and it looked remarkably like me and for a second I - because I had had a blackout that night - I wondered, could I have done such a thing? They had bushy eyebrows, a mole on his face, spoke even in 2D with an Irish accent."

Although it was a long time ago, he can still remember the mounting panic he felt when he first saw the suspect's image, as it was his double.

"They showed me a photo-fit, a pencil sketch of the guy that had attempted to murder, this other gentleman - had beat him up and left him in his own apartment, set the apartment on fire and split, thereby leaving him to burn to death - and it was me."

He revealed that he started to worry that because he couldn't remember where he was that night, he'd be in trouble.

They went, 'What do you think about that picture?' And I went, 'I think I'm in trouble,'" he recalled. "It was terrifying, I was there for about six hours and then thankfully a friend of mine had kept a journal of that particular night and that particular time we were at a party the other side of town doing ecstasy..."